Machine Habitus

We commonly think of society as made of and by humans, but with the proliferation of machine learning and AI technologies, this is clearly no longer the case. Billions of automated systems tacitly contribute to the social construction of reality by drawing algorithmic distinctions between the visible and the invisible, the relevant and the irrelevant, the likely and the unlikely – on and beyond platforms. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this book develops an original sociology of algorithms as social agents, actively participating in social life. Through a wide range of examples, Massimo Airoldi shows how society shapes algorithmic code, and how this culture in the code guides the practical behaviour of the code in the culture, shaping society in turn. The ‘machine habitus’ is the generative mechanism at work throughout myriads of feedback loops linking humans with artificial social agents, in the context of digital infrastructures and pre-digital social structures. Machine Habitus will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, media and cultural studies, science and technology studies and information technology, and to anyone interested in the growing role of algorithms and AI in our social and cultural life.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to seep into more areas of society and culture, critical social perspectives on its technologies are more urgent than ever before. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from experienced scholars across disciplines, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of critical AI studies.

This book proposes a new theoretical framework for approaching the causes and effects that digital technologies and the imaginaries related to them have on the processes of self-interpretation and subjectivation. It formulates three main theses. First, it argues that today’s digital technologies, which are primarily based on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and big data are formidable habitus machines: they offer increasingly personalized services, but these machines are actually indifferent to individuals and their personalities. Second, this book contends that the effectiveness of these machines does not depend solely on their concrete capacity to classify the social world. It also depends on the expectations, hopes, fears, and imaginaries that we have concerning these technologies and their capacities. This cultural habitus—a worldview, or world picture—leads us to believe in the concrete effectiveness of AI and its potential for our societies. Third, the author takes this Bourdieusian notion of habitus and connects it to current “empirical turn” in philosophy of technology. He contends that, by looking too closely at the things themselves, many philosophers of technology have deprived themselves of the possibility to study the symbolic conditions of possibility in which single technological artifacts are always embedded. Digital Habitus will appeal to scholars and students working in philosophy of technology, the ethics of artificial intelligence, media studies, and science and technology studies.

Since their invention, computers have kept revolutionizing the world at a staggering pace. And yet, if on one side this ongoing revolution keeps providing an incessant stream of novel and previously unimaginable technologies, on the other, as with all revolutions, its profound effects threaten to upend much of the previous world order. Facing the many questions that this change is urgently raising will require to acquire a novel and interdisciplinary understanding of the powerful forces that govern this process. Sitting squarely at the crossroads of computer science, history, socioeconomics, ethics, and philosophy, and written by an insider who contributed foundational work to many of the latest and most pervasive technologies this book offers a much-needed reframing of the past, present and future of computing, that goes far beyond the typical chronological record of events and arms us with a uniquely broad and integrated analysis of their complex origins and their numerous side effects.

Literature holds a privileged place in Deleuze’s works. Not only is it the art that most clearly reveals his aesthetics, but it also serves as the laboratory of his thought, the space where he experiments with concepts that become part of his ongoing philosophical project. In this brilliant analyses of Deleuze’s texts on Proust, Sacher-Masoch, Kafka, Carmelo Bene, Melville and Beckett, Pombo Nabais traces the development of Deleuze’s aesthetics across three distinct periods of his thought: the transcendental empiricism of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense; the philosophy of Nature of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus; and the philosophy of Spirit of The Fold, What Is Philosophy? and Essays Critical and Clinical. More than a simple account of Deleuze’s literary theory and aesthetics, this book offers a provocative and original reading of Deleuze’s entire philosophy, highlighting the question of modality (the actual, the virtual, the possible, the impossible and the incompossible), the problematic relationship between the event and the assemblage, and the unifying theme of the vitalism of nonorganic life.

Over the last decade, journalism has undergone radical changes: new languages, actors and methods have risen especially due to the digital transformation, revolutionizing this field in unpredictable ways. This book collects the most relevant scientific outputs of the Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education Post-Crisis Journalism in Post-Crisis Libya: A Bottom-up Approach to the Development of a Cross-Media Journalism Master Program (PAgES), co-funded by the European Commission in the Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education framework. It is ideally divided into two parts: the first section focuses on the theoretical and epistemological challenges of contemporary journalism, while the second part deals with the experiences of journalism(s), evoking tools, technical skills, and practices that are required within the media industry. Addressing topics concerning artificial intelligence, the role of algorithms, citizen journalism, the impact of Covid-19 and its challenges, social media dissemination, and many more, it gives a comprehensive and plural overview of what journalism is, or can be, today.

Organizations now measure and rank nearly every aspect of our lives, using data to make predictions about our purchasing power, tastes, and character. The Ordinal Society shows how these predictions structure life chances, producing a hollow morality that launders familiar forms of social advantage into an illusion of merit.

Modern institutional economics was created to study the institutions of pre-digital economies and is based on reductionist approaches. But digital capitalism is producing institutions of unprecedented complexity. This book argues therefore that not only the economic institutions themselves but also the theoretical foundations for studying those institutions must now be adapted to digital capitalism. The book focuses on the institutional complexity of digital capitalism, developing an interdisciplinary framework which brings together cutting-edge theoretical approaches from philosophy (first of all, object-oriented ontology), sociology (especially actor-network theory), evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. In particular, the book outlines a new approach to the study of institutional evolution, based on extended evolutionary synthesis – a new paradigm in evolutionary biology, which is now replacing neo-Darwinism. The book develops an enactivist notion of extended cognition and cognitive institutions, rejecting the individualistic and mechanistic understanding of economic rationality in digital environments. The author experiments with new philosophical approaches to investigate institutional complexity, for example, the ideas of the flat ontology and the assemblage theory. The flat ontology approach is applied to the study of human-robot institutions, as well as to thinking about post-anthropocentric institutional design. Assemblage thinking allows for a new (much less idealistic) look at blockchain and smart cities. Blockchain as digital institutional technology is considered in the book not from the viewpoint of minimizing transaction costs (as is customary in the modern institutional economics), but by using the theory of transaction value which focuses on improving the quality of digital transactions. The book includes a wide range of examples ranging from metaverses, cryptocurrencies and big data to robot rules, smart contracts and machine learning algorithms. Written for researchers in institutional economics and other social sciences, this interdisciplinary book is essential reading for anyone interested in the interplay of institutional and digital change.